A chicken bus is a colloquial English name for a colorful modified and decorated US school bus and transit bus that transports goods and people between communities in Honduras and Guatemala. The word "chicken" refers to the fact that rural Guatemalans regularly transport live animals on such buses, a practice that visitors from other countries often find remarkable. The buses are also commonly used in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, and Costa Rica.

Ever see pears in a fancy wine bottle and ask yourself how they did it. How, indeed? Its quite simple, find a pear tree and all you need to do is put a bottle over the growing pear. The pear will grow inside of the bottle.

Once it's at full growth, break it off from the tree and keep it in the bottle.

A few of the things I already own and love (dearly) -- from top: my beloved taikaittala dishes, a white dress I bought late last spring and can't wait to bust out this year, bryan's table and a groovy cement birdbath found by my genius friend achlee that I use as a centerpiece...

Well friends we have reached the end, crossed the finish line, we're done, finis.

Tomorrow is the official end of the Spending Hiatus (for me at least... some of you might be following a different schedule), and I'm feeling pretty darn good about the whole enterprise. I'm not sure I'm ready to bust out a full assessment of this year's hiatus, as I'm still processing, but I can say for sure that I'm glad I did it and would do it again. So there you have it for now...

I was good in this final week, making only one necessary purchase in the form of new yoga pants, as my old ones have a hole in the, well...rear region. Despite the fact that I'm not so much into the "exercising", I do go on a lot of neighborhood bike rides with the girlies (we have a hilly neighborhood, so bonus points, no?), and I wear yoga pants on these little jaunts. (I bike in my flip flops in case your wondering given the whole lack of tennis shoe situation -- I know, I know.)

I can't very well go riding around my neighborhood with my bum hanging out, right?

So the new yoga pants were a necessity. And the big accomplishment here friends was walking into the Gap for said yoga pants and walking out with nothing else. Just the yoga pants. No bag even...I jammed them in my purse. No fuss, no muss, giving me confidence that I'm not going to go completely off the wagon and embark on spend-fest 2010 come midnight tonight.

I feel ready (I think) to go out into the world of responsible, mindful shopping.

So how was this final (for some of you) week for you guys? Are you ready for this bad boy to be over?

Strangely enough, such a thing as an Easter tree already exists, and it can be found in Germany. Around 1945, when he was just a young boy, Volker Kraft saw his very first Easter Tree (Eierbaum, Osterbaum or Ostereirbaum, in German), and decided he would have one of his very own, when he grew up. Time passed and young Volker became a married man, with a family and everything. But his childhood dream stuck with him and he decorated his first Easter Tree, in 1965. He used 18 colored plastic eggs.

But the tree was growing fast and he and his wife, Christa couldn’t afford to waste so many Easter eggs. So they began drilling holes into the eggs, using the contents in the kitchen, and the painted shells as decorations. When their children grew up, they started helping with the decorating,and the Easter Tree became a family tradition, known not only in their home town of Saalfeld, but all of Germany.

After their kids moved out of the house, it seemed the Easter Tree would finally catch a break, but grandsons arrived and the Krafts went back to decorating their giant tree. The number of Easter eggs hung by the tree’s branches grew every year,and in 2010 it reached an incredible 9,500 eggs.

A simple but elegant solution to a common household problem: you have raw bacon, but you have no frying pan with which to cook it. You do, however, have a machine gun. All you have to do is wrap the bacon in tin foil, tie it around the barrel of your Rheinmetall MG 3, and fire off about 150 rounds (250 if you like it crispy). Step-by-step pictures after the jump.